The Limits of American Cinephilia

The history of cinephilia—of movie madness as an artistic principle—is a tale of two cities, New York and Paris. The enduring prominence of the Parisian branch is now back in the forefront, because the National Society of Film Critics (of which I’m a member) gave “Goodbye to Language,” by Jean-Luc Godard, the award for Best Picture. As for the New York branch, its history and its influence are more obscure, but they’re brought to light in an important new book, “Be Sand, Not Oil: The Life and Work of Amos Vogel,” edited by Paul Cronin. The conflict that arose between the two cities’ cinematic preoccupations provoked a major crisis in Vogel’s life. But Vogel’s story is more that just a tale of his times; it’s a crucial map of the way we think about movies now.

In 1947, when he was twenty-six and a student at the New School for Social Research, Vogel founded Cinema 16, a film society where he could show what, even then, he called independent films—“documentary, nonfiction, and experimental films,” as he later explained. He was an anti-Soviet socialist who, as a Jew, had been forced from Austria by the rise of Nazism; he saw himself as a defender of “human values” and considered Hollywood movies to be inimical to them. Cronin’s book includes a previously unpublished 1947 essay by Vogel, written for a New School class, called “The Ideals of the American Middle Class in U.S. Movies,” which begins by defining Hollywood as a “vehicle” for ideological indoctrination of the mass audience and concludes that Hollywood movies are “hokum.”

Vogel founded Cinema 16 in order to show movies that he himself wanted to see and that weren’t otherwise available—at the time, he explained, “there existed virtually no other outlets for independent filmmakers.” But his pleasures had a basis in principle: “The society’s stated purpose … was to counteract the machine-made products of Hollywood and help bring about change in society by the display of radically new codes and content.”

Cinema 16 got its title from the 16-mm. prints that Vogel showed, a reference to the nonprofessional format used (to this day) by many independents. He had no theatre: he rented out halls and funded his noncommercial, nonprofit venture by basing it on subscriptions. The film society had as many as seven thousand subscribers; it offered two screenings per evening at a hall that seated seventeen hundred people, as well as Sunday-morning screenings at a variety of theatres throughout Manhattan and a wide range of seminars and discussions that included such luminaries as Ralph Ellison, Fritz Lang, Lotte Lenya, Jean Renoir, Dylan Thomas, and Tennessee Williams.

Vogel recalls, with verve and justified pride, the exertions that it took for him to keep the organization going (“The arc projectors necessitated the transportation of approximately twenty individual carrying cases, piled into our station wagon, from which our screaming sons had been temporarily displaced”), and details the vast amount of viewing, as well as publicity, printing, mailing, and “list maintenance,” that went into the operation. (He also had to deal with the absurd, labyrinthine, and intrusive demands of New York State censors—he turned Cinema 16 into a subscription-only organization as a way around their regulations.)

Vogel soon expanded to 35-mm. projection as well, and showed a remarkable array of foreign films that were otherwise unavailable in the United States. (Among the filmmakers he introduced are Michelangelo Antonioni, Agnès Varda, Robert Bresson, and John Cassavetes.) In the book’s historical essay on Cinema 16, Scott MacDonald writes that Alfred Hitchcock brought Vogel a print of the remake of “The Man Who Knew Too Much” to première, and introduced the screening. Meanwhile, Vogel taught classes on movies at the New School and N.Y.U.—his mission was, from the start, educational—and he championed otherwise unavailable films that he admired by becoming a film distributor, too.

In early 1963, Vogel had to close Cinema 16 for economic reasons (“a one-cent postal increase amounted to $1000 per year,” he wrote), but the timing was propitious: Lincoln Center was about to inaugurate the New York Film Festival, and Vogel was hired to co-program it, along with Richard Roud. Tom Yoshikami’s essay on Vogel’s work with the festival tells an important story. At the time, it wasn’t apparent to many people that movies, widely considered only a popular entertainment, belonged at Lincoln Center at all, and in its first few years the N.Y.F.F. was an institution under siege, one that was criticized in the press and that had to justify its existence and renewal to Lincoln Center’s administration each year.

The festival began mainly as a showcase for foreign films, but Lincoln Center wanted Roud and Vogel to include more American movies in their lineups. They showed some noteworthy American independents, including Adolfas Mekas’s “Hallelujah the Hills” and Michael Roemer’s “Nothing But a Man,” but the festival also began presenting some Hollywood films—and was urged by Lincoln Center’s administration to show more of them. The programmed features, despite their great artistic ambition, weren’t all up to Vogel’s provocative standards; he felt, as quoted by Yoshikami, that Roud was “too much involved in the French orbit, which was also part of the auteurist thing.” In other words, Roud showed lots of films from the French New Wave, and was also open to including many more Hollywood films—at least, ones made by directors he deemed to be artists working within the studio system.

Meanwhile, Vogel devoted his attention to creating sidebars in which he could screen experimental films that didn’t figure in the festival’s main slate. For Vogel, they weren’t window dressing; they were crucial to the festival’s fulfillment of the educational mission that he considered essential to a noncommercial, artistically significant, and socially influential film exhibition. Vogel also saw the festival as a mere beginning: he wanted Lincoln Center to become the site of a year-round film center that would combine a movie theatre, a museum, a research facility, an archive, and a film school that would be the cinematic counterpart to Juilliard. When plans were launched for the founding of the American Film Institute, Vogel sought to have it integrated into Lincoln Center.

Writing in 1965, Vogel expressed his astonished delight that the New York Film Festival was attracting a “young audience,” and he detailed the myriad activities of this youthful audience, such as reading serious film journals and devotedly attending screenings at repertory houses. A year later, he went further, writing of an “emergence of film as the art of the young” and saying that the young “feel most akin to the nouvelle vague, to cinema vérité, to the ‘new cinema’ in Europe, Japan, America.” Vogel not only meant that young people were watching movies more ambitiously, he affirmed the sudden rise of filmmaking as the center of young artists’ ambitions and endeavors: “In previous times, the young ‘took hold’ of the pen. Today, they take hold of the camera.”

Yet, at the same time, tensions increased between administrators, who wanted the N.Y.F.F. to offer a little more “show business,” and the programmers. A programming committee was imposed on Vogel and Roud (Susan Sontag soon joined it). A budget crisis in 1968 led Lincoln Center to cut all of the festival’s ancillary activities. Vogel’s experimental-film and educational sidebars came to an end, as did his ambitious plans for Lincoln Center’s film center, and at the end of the year he resigned.

Vogel was forty-seven; strangely, although the work for which he would be most enduringly remembered was still to come, the rest of his career was a sort of decrescendo. First, he was hired by Grove Press’s audacious publisher, Barney Rosset, to run their film branch, but this project was short-lived. Then he moved definitively to academia. Michael Chaiken’s essay on Vogel’s teaching career tells the story of Vogel’s brief run at Harvard, followed by a move, in 1973, to the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught until his retirement, in 1991. Vogel died in 2012.

The work in question is Vogel’s extraordinary book from 1974, “Film as a Subversive Art.” It is, in effect, a retrospective compendium of the activities of Cinema 16, including Vogel’s subsequent enthusiasms of the late sixties and early seventies (including films by Werner Herzog, Pere Portabella, Yoko Ono, Russ Meyer, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder). It’s organized thematically and is richly illustrated (the copious stills are prominent and as significant as the text), and it’s filled with capsule reviews of hundreds of films that exemplify his key theme of subversion and embody his own cinematic passions.

Meanwhile, Vogel also maintained, throughout the new era of New Hollywood, his political stance toward commercial movie making, as seen in his essays, included in Cronin’s book, unpeeling the ideological indoctrinations of “The Exorcist” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” The exemplary document of Vogel’s increasing dismay with the cinematic spirit of the time is a furious, despairing letter that he wrote to Sontag in 1969, when he was no longer affiliated with the New York Film Festival, to vent his spleen at the choice of opening-night film: Paul Mazursky’s first feature, “Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice.”

In the light of history, however, the choice was a good one. Mazursky’s film may well be the best Hollywood movie of that year, and it’s an exemplary modern film in its tone and its direction. In Mazursky, the programmers rightly saw a director of the future. But Vogel asks, “What possible reason, explanation and justification can you find in your heart for the film that opened the Festival?” He asserts, “Cinematically, this film does not exist … Ideologically, it is reactionary.” He feared that “many, especially among the young” would wonder “whether the selection of a Hollywood film for opening night, which cannot be justified in any manner except the most odious one, does portend a change for the festival as a whole, representative of the precise distance between ‘The Exterminating Angel’ and ‘Bob & Carol.’ ” I don’t think that the distance is very great; Buñuel’s film is wilder and angrier, while Mazursky’s is more ambiguous, more documentary—and just as strange.

Vogel had quickly gone from being ahead of the times to behind them. It’s a state of affairs that he foresaw. He wrote, in his book, that the “subversive creator” must “immediately supersede himself; for at the moment of victory, he is already dated.” He was a futuristic visionary—he understood from the start that the future of the cinema would lie with independent filmmakers. He devoted his career to cultivating a viewership for their films and, knowing firsthand of the difficulty in getting these films to their ready or potential audience, he wrote, in 1968, of the revolution that would ensue from “the new home video recorders”: “the day is coming when—just as we can pick up a Dostoevsky novel for 85¢ at the nearest drugstore—we will be able to purchase a Fellini feature and play it back at leisure through our television set.”

The story of New York cinephilia is the story of Vogel’s successes and failures, of his accurate and futuristic view of the cinema to come as well as of the doctrinal assumptions that got in the way—ideas that have, amazingly, been belatedly resurgent among today’s critics and that, in their way, resist the very current of appreciation that he sought to inculcate.

Vogel and Cinema 16 created better viewers; Cahiers du Cinéma and its auteurists created better filmmakers. Vogel inspired the desire to learn about movies; Cahiers aroused the desire to make movies. The films that Vogel wasn’t showing—films by Howard Hawks and Nicholas Ray, Vincente Minnelli and Otto Preminger, Samuel Fuller and Ida Lupino and Douglas Sirk—would surface in repertory houses and at MOMA in the sixties, at the same time the first New Wave films were making their way here. When Vogel wrote, in 1966, of the throng of young filmmakers, he was writing about young auteurists. They weren’t inspired by the preoccupations of Cinema 16 but, as Vogel mentions, by the New Wave. Vogel’s screenings and seminars primed the pump and stimulated interest in a broad range of filmmakers, but it didn’t launch a generation. The Cahiers critics-turned-New Wave directors and their American acolytes, including Richard Roud, Peter Bogdanovich, and Andrew Sarris, did.

That’s because the young critics of Cahiers—Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and their elder, Eric Rohmer; the future filmmakers of the New Wave—didn’t say, in effect, “Let’s spend more time looking at wrongly marginalized films,” or even “These unrecognized filmmakers are better and more important than ones who are wrongly celebrated.” They didn’t claim that it would make the world a better place if you watched films directed by Hitchcock and Hawks. They said, in effect, “Hitchcock and Hawks and other Hollywood greats are the equals of Faulkner and Picasso. If you think that the grand classics of modern art are worth your while, then you must also be Hitchcocko-Hawksians, as we are.”

In New York, Hollywood seemed like the enemy because America seemed like a company town, where the ballyhoo was unavoidable in the press, on the airwaves, and in the streets. In Paris, Hollywood movies were novel, exotic—and also decontextualized. In New York, where high culture struggled to gain a foothold, the pop aspect of Hollywood movies rendered them suspect. In Paris, the critics who made the New Wave didn’t praise pop as an alternative to high culture—they decreed the popular movies they loved to be a part of high culture, despite appearances to the contrary.

These young critics were able to make such bold assertions—with a straight face and unshakable confidence—because they saw themselves as future artists of the same calibre as the Hollywood directors they admired, and derived their inspiration from these filmmakers. And when these critics became world-renowned filmmakers, they proved their thesis and their boast: the filmmakers they anointed as great artists of the time have indeed, as a result, become widely recognized as such. (The evidence is in the recognition of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” in Sight & Sound’s 2012 poll, as the best film of all time.)

The auteurists and Roud, Sarris, and the young Bogdanovich produced filmmakers; Vogel produced viewers. Yet he proved prescient in this regard, too. There will always be more viewers than filmmakers, more college students than artists, and Vogel rightly anticipated that the center of serious discussion about movies would, in the future, be the university. It turned out that the academic world has been extraordinarily fertile soil for the subjects of his concern. Avant-garde film has become an important subject of study, and it’s likely that academic interest in it has extended its reach far beyond Vogel’s dreams when he launched Cinema 16.

The university setting has also given a new life to Vogel’s crucial theme: the notion of subversion. Journalistic criticism distinguishes itself from cinema studies with the assertion of beauty, which has little place in the quasi-scientific realm of academic study. Vogel’s notion of subversive art depended on his setting up of a straw man of conventions that films subverted, the norms that they defied. Those norms can be demonstrated empirically, as can the departure from them; thus, his fundamental artistic value system was one that was seemingly ready-made for academic adoption.

Vogel’s ideological analyses of films and his extraction of their hidden political messages could serve as models for today’s recap culture. His utilitarian approach to these movies is the dominant mode of critical discourse now, because critics, seeking to justify their own public usefulness beyond matters of mere taste, tend to put politics in the foreground and take politics as the touchstone of art. The fusion of ideological orthodoxies with the analytical tools of Roland Barthes’s “Mythologies”—the convergence of self-justifying moralism with the habits of academic literary study —is the intellectual springboard for the mode of appreciation of so-called quality television, which is essentially sociological, not aesthetic. (Lili Loofbourow, writing recently in the Guardian, makes that point in detail, albeit approvingly.)

Whether the fare in question would have satisfied what Vogel called his “very visual eye that tends toward painterly values,” whether it would have struck him as “subversive,” is another matter altogether. Vogel was a thinker of deep multiplicities and contradictions, an aesthetic hedonist as well as an ideologue, and his own inner conflicts proved immensely productive and remain unresolved, by him and by history.

In any case, Vogel’s dream of American independent filmmaking offering a significant artistic counterweight to Hollywood films has been fulfilled: independent films are now better, more original, more forward-looking than ever. The French cinephile stream exemplified by the New Wave filmmakers has won the hearts and minds of these independent filmmakers, and inspires them to this day. But the American cinephilia launched by Vogel, with its emphasis on ideological scrutiny, holds sway over many critics and viewers, perhaps more firmly than ever. That’s why the gap that Vogel lamented—the one dividing the best of independent filmmaking from the critical community and the audience—is also larger than ever.